Good evening, and welcome to EBible Fellowship’s Bible study in the book of Genesis.  Tonight is study #3 of Genesis, chapter 27, and we are going to read Genesis 27:11-27:

And Jacob said to Rebekah his mother, Behold, Esau my brother is a hairy man, and I am a smooth man: My father peradventure will feel me, and I shall seem to him as a deceiver; and I shall bring a curse upon me, and not a blessing. And his mother said unto him, Upon me be thy curse, my son: only obey my voice, and go fetch me them. And he went, and fetched, and brought them to his mother: and his mother made savoury meat, such as his father loved. And Rebekah took goodly raiment of her eldest son Esau, which were with her in the house, and put them upon Jacob her younger son: And she put the skins of the kids of the goats upon his hands, and upon the smooth of his neck: And she gave the savoury meat and the bread, which she had prepared, into the hand of her son Jacob.

Last time, we were discussing the salvation plan of God which this pictures.  It is a historical parable that reveals to us how God had determined to give one of these twins the blessing, and not the other.  And that is a picture of what God has done with the entire human race of all mankind.  We saw in Matthew 25 that when the Lord Jesus Christ would come to reign as King of the earth, and I will read a couple of verses there, in Matthew 25:31-33:

When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.

This is in progress right now, as we are presently living on the earth in the Day of Judgment, and the Lord Jesus has come as Judge and is seated on His judgment throne to rule with a rod of iron and to bring about the final separation of sheep and goats; or those that have done righteously or those that have done wickedly.  The righteous have done righteously because Christ’s righteousness has been imputed to them and counted to them for their righteousness.   As the Bible says, “…by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous.”  They are the elect. 

On the other hand are those that were not made righteous by the righteousness of Christ, and they have to answer for their own sins and the way they lived their lives and the (wicked) things they have done.  They are typified by the goats that are on the left that receive the curse.  The sheep receive the blessing, and the goats receive the curse.  The righteous are blessed of God, and the unrighteous are cursed of God.  Here, God is illustrating, in a sense, the overall theme of Judgment Day wherein it becomes time to make the final determination of who receives the blessing and who does not.  Again, that is why Isaac’s age – which we can figure to be 120 – is so important.  It is the completion of the fulness of time at the end of the world, and it points to events taking place in our current day.

Now Rebekah had been told by God when these two boys were in her womb that they were two manners of people, and the elder would serve the younger.  No doubt, as a result of being told that by God, she favored Jacob, and she desired for Jacob to receive the blessing.  Isaac’s favorite son was Esau, the elder, and Isaac wanted to give the blessing as the Law of God would have him to do, which was to give it to the firstborn.   And, yet, the firstborn was not worthy.  He had sold his birthright and, again, we talked about how this relates to mankind who is the firstborn son of God.  If you read the genealogy in Luke 3, and we are not going to read all of these names, but it goes all the way back to the patriarchs we read about in the book of Genesis.  It says in Luke 3:37-38:

Which was the son of Mathusala, which was the son of Enoch, which was the son of Jared, which was the son of Maleleel, which was the son of Cainan, Which was the son of Enos, which was the son of Seth, which was the son of Adam, which was the son of God.

Adam is said to be “the son of God,” and as such, he was the firstborn in the sense of creation when God formed him from the dust of the ground.  He would receive the blessing.  The birthright was his, but Adam despised his birthright, just as Esau, by disobeying God the Father and bringing death upon himself and his descendants, and so forth.  So God cannot give the blessing to the firstborn (to mankind), even though mankind was in that position because he was created first.  Due to his despising of the birthright through his sinful action, God determined to give it to another, which, in this case, was Jacob, the supplanter, the one who grabbed the heel of his brother.  So Jacob is a type and figure of the elect chosen people. 

But why is it that God’s elect receive the birthright instead of our fellow man, the rest of mankind?  Is it because of anything we have done?  Were we somehow more obedient, whereas our fellow man failed?   Where our fellow man failed to be righteous, are we righteous?  Are we good?  Have we upheld the Law on every point?  Are we some special “breed” of human beings that are counted as God’s elect?  No way.  “We were children of wrath, even as others,” the Bible says.  We are as wicked and, maybe in some cases, more wicked than those that did not receive the blessing, our fellow man, as typified by Esau.  They did not obtain God’s grace and mercy in salvation.  They are not given the gift of eternal life.  They do not receive the inheritance of the new heaven and new earth and life for evermore in the very presence of God.  They receive none of it. 

And we cannot look to anything in ourselves, like our wisdom: “Oh, we were wise, and we chose Christ.”  God says, “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you.”  That is why we are elect.  We are not elect because we have chosen God.  That has absolutely nothing to do with it.  It was God’s choice of certain ones.  Did we receive it because there was just something in us wherein even though we are sinners are others, we were a little bit better in some area?  Did we have a sense of truth or a sense of doing right, when it comes right down to it, even though we are wicked in many things?  No – if we have offended in one point, the Bible says we are guilty of all (sin).  So nobody can think, “I am basically good.  I do admit that I have done evil and I have done wrong, but, basically, I am a good person.”  No – that kind of person is nowhere to be found.  The Bible says there are none good.  There are none righteous.  Let me read that.  We can read it in both the Old Testament and the New Testament, but since we are in the Old Testament, we can look at Psalm 14:2-3:

JEHOVAH looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there were any that did understand, and seek God. They are all gone aside, they are all together become filthy: there is none that doeth good, no, not one.

That is the statement from God’s perspective as He looks down from heaven upon the children of men.  He is not looking at just a limited number.  He is not looking down on one nation only.  It is all the children of men upon the face of the earth.  God has that piercing gaze and a viewpoint that sees all: “…all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do.”  He does not miss a thing.  More than that, He is not only seeing the outward acts of men (the things that other men can see), but God sees into the heart.  He sees the desperate wickedness, the deceitful nature, and the flow of iniquity that gushes out of that heart of stone.  He sees this, and He is able to make assessment, as we see in that Psalm of David.  God used David at some point from 1037 B. C. until his death in 967 B. C. to write that statement in his time.  Or, we can look at Genesis 6, the time before the flood, and we know the flood came in 4990 B. C., so this is going back over seven thousand years, and we read in Genesis 6:5:

And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.

There, again, it is an all-encompassing gaze and all-encompassing assessment of mankind dwelling on the earth and the condition of their hearts.  It never changes.  We could go from that point to the time of David, or we could go, perhaps, a thousand years from the time of David to Romans 3:10:

As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one: There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one.

Not a single one.  So God is certainly establishing this as absolute truth when we read of Jacob as he is about to receive the blessing instead of his brother Esau, but in a deceitful way, a sinful way.  He has nothing in him – absolutely nothing – as Romans 9 tells us that God chose Jacob over Esau, “…neither having done any good or evil.”  God had determined and made choice to save Jacob, and not Esau, and the elder would serve the younger, because, “Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.”  It is only because of the grace of God.

So God does this, and we can see by the sinful actions of Jacob and the way he got the blessing that there is nothing in that whole scenario that would cause God to say, “Now this man (Jacob) deserves my abundant blessing of eternal life more than the other man.”  All we can see is that if God were reckoning the (sinful) actions of Jacob just as He was reckoning the sinful acts of Esau, and if God were upholding the same standard for both, then Jacob would, likewise, be under the curse of God and receive no blessing.

So God is doing something different with Jacob, and it has nothing to do with Jacob himself.  It has to do with the One who has stood in for Jacob – One who took the place of Jacob and born his sins, including all the deceitfulness involved in obtaining the blessing itself. 

We could even apply that to later generations of people that did accept Christ (not all of them, of course, but only God’s elect among them), or others that thought, “Oh, if I join a church, I will be right with God, or if I partake of the Lord’s Table, I will be right with God.”  They are all sinful ideas, doctrines and actions, and none of it contributed in the least bit to the salvation of any one of them.  And, yet, because they were elect, God still had grace upon whom He would have mercy and grace, and He saved them, despite these things, and in no way because of these things.  Or course, after saving them, God would open up their eyes to His grace: “No – you did not seek me, but I sought you.”  There is that wonderful hymn we play sometimes on EBible Fellowship’s radio station that says, “Afterwards I knew that it was Him seeking me.”  And that is a wonderful truth because after God saves some individuals, He opens their eyes to the true sequence of events in salvation – God does the work.  It is the faith of Christ.  It is His action, and His choosing.  He saved the sinner, and He loved us first.  Then afterwards, we love Him, and we begin to do the will of God and to keep His commandments.

Of course, especially at this time of the end, God is clarifying the Gospel and revealing to those He has saved the true way of salvation that is all of God: “Salvation is of JEHOVAH.”  It is of the Lord, and not of man.

Now in this verse we read that it said of Jacob that he was a “smooth” man, and that Esau was a “hairy” man.  And this was one of Jacob’s concern in going ahead with his mother’s plan to go to his father, pretending to be his brother Esau to receive the blessing.  Again, it says in Genesis 27:11-12:

And Jacob said to Rebekah his mother, Behold, Esau my brother is a hairy man, and I am a smooth man: My father peradventure will feel me, and I shall seem to him as a deceiver; and I shall bring a curse upon me, and not a blessing.

This is interesting.  Actually, regarding the word “feel,” later on we will see that this is exactly what Isaac does.  His eyes were gone, so he felt him to see if he was hairy, and he was deceived by the skin of the goats.  He was not able to discern that it was Jacob and not Esau.  The word “feel” is translated as “searched” a couple of time.  Later on, Jacob’s wife Rachel stole the idol from her father Laban at the time that Jacob and his family were running away from Laban.  Laban caught up with them, and he began “searching” for that idol.  And this is what Isaac is doing – he is trying to “search” to determine if this is the one that should get the blessing.  We know that Isaac is a type of God, and it is God, ultimately, who gives the blessing of salvation to His people.  And God does “search” His people to know their hearts and to see what is in them.  But I am not sure if we can go that far with this idea, but it is interesting that Jacob does not qualify because he was said to be a “smooth” man. 

The word “smooth” is an unusual word.  It is translated as “flattering” and as “smooth,” and it does not seem to be used in a good way, if we go to Proverbs 5:3:

For the lips of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil:

Of course, a “strange woman” identifies with false gospels and bringing false teachings or lies.

It say sin Proverbs 26:28:

A lying tongue hateth those that are afflicted by it; and a flattering mouth worketh ruin.

The word “flattering” is the word “smooth.”

Also, it says in Ezekiel 12:24:

For there shall be no more any vain vision nor flattering divination within the house of Israel.

All those verses would relate to someone teaching falsely, teaching lies and teaching other gospels.  And this is what the word “smooth” leads us to, as it is only used about five or six times in the Bible.  So that is pretty strong evidence.

Why is God identifying that word with Jacob?  Again, one thing for certain is that it is not exalting Jacob in any way.  It is not linking him to that which is good, in case someone would get the idea that Jacob had something good in him.  No.  If anything, it is telling us that this action of attempting to deceive Isaac would be like those that try to deceive their way into the kingdom of God.  They try to “lie” their way into heaven with their false gospels.  That would be the identification or link we would make, unless it was anyone else but Jacob, because we know he is a picture of those that do become saved and adhere to the true Gospel of the Bible.

So I do not think we should take that too far, except to realize that God is certainly laying out a picture of Isaac that is “unflattering,” as we know the word “smooth” is a word for “flattering,” and it is an unflattering picture of the one who would get the blessing.  And that would be us, if we are truly saved by God’s grace, and this is why none of us can take any credit (for salvation).  None of us have received salvation based on merit.  It is an unmerited gift of grace, if we are saved.  It has nothing to do with our intelligence, wisdom, or righteousness.  It has nothing to with us, period. 

The only role we play in God’s magnificent salvation program is the role of a “stinking, dead corpse,” that Lazarus so accurately pictured when he had been dead already four days, and it was said, “…by this time he stinketh: for he hath been dead four days.”  Our sins “stink” unto heaven and, yet, God had mercy and commanded, as He did Lazarus, “Come forth!”  And we have come forth, and since that time, it has been an unraveling of the graveclothes covering us, as our eyes have been opened and we have understood the things of the Bible, the truth of the Word of God.  And to God be the glory.  God gets all the glory, and we get none, for the simple reason that we deserve none.  It is but for the grace of God, without any question, when we look at our fellow man.  When we look at our brother Esau, we ought not to look down upon him as if we were better than he.  It is just not true.  The truth is that we are just as sinful.  And God, for His own good pleasure and for nothing He saw in us, had determined to save Jacob and to love him, and not to save Esau and to hate him.